My very last VHS player crapped out and died on me over Christmas. Don’t feel too bad about this though as, truth be told, I hadn’t used it properly in years, but this got me thinking about the VHS era, and my history with it, a story that now has a definite beginning, middle and end. My family were relative late comers when it came to video, I don’t think we owned a VHS player till around 1986. So the famous Video Nasty furore had largely been played out by the time my parents scrimped and saved enough for a VHS player. The very first video rental shop we went to was “The North West Video Centre”. Which all sounds very grand but in reality was just some guy who, in a moment of Thatcherite entrepreneurialism, had hollowed out his front room into a video shop, decking out the four walls of it in video shelves, with a dividing VHS stand down the centre of the shop, which initially separated the VHS releases from the Beta releases. Yes, Beta was still hanging in on there till as late as 1986, but it wasn’t long before the shop became a hundred per cent VHS. Which, come to think about it, must have been a massive setback for these small, independent video shop owners, given that nearly half their stock suddenly became obsolete. Somehow though, the North West Video Centre weathered the death of Beta, and for many years this tiny little shop seemed to have the monopoly on video rentals...I don’t recall any other video rental shop in the immediate area. The closest that it seemed to have by way of competition was the local library, a Brutalist monstrosity called The Lancastrian Hall and Central Library, which half heartily branched out into renting videos, albeit only with a relatively safe and mainstream taste in movies...The Man with Two Brains, I-Man, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Disney’s Baby were amongst the titles that I for some reason remember. Whether it was a knock on effect of the Video Nasties saga, I don’t know, but horror titles were thin on the ground at that place. Their only horror title that sticks in my memory was The Beast Within, with its “please kill me” tag line. Since I would have been about 8 or 9 at the time, there was of course no chance I was going to get to see movies like that for a long time.
Alarmist newspaper pieces might have been awash with scare stories about irresponsible working class parents letting their kids watch Driller Killer or Cannibal Holocaust at home while they went down the pub, but in reality myself and everyone I knew had parents that kept a fairly vigilant and responsible eye on what their kids watched. At that age, the only things down at the North West Video Centre that my parents allowed me to watch was a Captain America cartoon (I still have that “when Captain America throws his mighty shield” song imprinted on my brain) and Time Bandits. A little admission, I’ve always hated Time Bandits, I don’t know if it is the film itself, or whether it just came to represent my own personal nemesis when it came to getting in the way of the really cool looking horror films I wanted to see at the North West Video Centre. Inevitably, when you were in those places it was the titles that you couldn’t see that had the greater hold over your imagination. Ones I vividly remember were Galaxy of Terror, The Monster Club, Time Walker, Ragewar and Zone Troopers. These days I have managed to catch up with the majority of those, with the exception of Ragewar, and have to wonder if I had been able to see these films as a kid, whether they’d have had the same impact on me. Don’t get me wrong, I would be prepared to fight in the corner of some of them, but none ever really lived up to my childhood expectations. Especially Galaxy of Terror whose cover, if you remember, had this skeletal bird creature attacking a woman, and for years you try to imagine how that scene will look on screen, and of course when you eventually watch the film you discover that scene isn’t in the film. That VHS cover presumably being born out of the Roger Corman theory of thinking up a title and poster before the film itself, and may have been my earliest life lesson in how B-Movies can play fast and loose with the truth.
Looking back,
my parents weren’t entirely spoilsports when it came to what I was watching. Anything that showed up on late night
television was deemed okay, so I got to see all the Hammer and Amicus movies at
a relatively young age. Curiously, I
don’t recall seeing any Hammer or Amicus films on the VHS rental shelves, with
the exception of The Satanic Rites of Dracula on Warner. I know some of those films had pre-cert VHS
releases, but by the late 1980s those appeared to have disappeared from the
shelves. I wonder if the fact that those
films played so much on late night TV back then meant that there was a
perception that they weren’t going to do much business at the video rental
stores.
former site of The North West Video Centre
I’m sure the people who were born after the VHS era,
or who only saw the back end of it, have the idea that VHS store owners were
these rogues who’d offer kids video nasties under the counter when their
parents weren’t looking, but I’m afraid the ones I was around had an unfortunately
moral streak to them, albeit with the occasional touch of twisted humour to go
with it. I remember I nearly came close
to talking my parents into renting Return of the Living Dead for me, but then
they decided to open up the question of whether I was old enough to watch the
film to the owner of the North West Video Centre, who with a mischievous grin
then went into the most lurid description of Return of the Living Dead I’ve
ever heard. It was along the lines of
“well...do you think he is old enough to see a film where half a dog is
squirming about on the floor, or where brains are eaten, oh and a head is sawed
off...” and then he began describing scenes that weren’t actually in the film
“is he old enough to see maggots tearing through human flesh”. What version of Return of the Living Dead had
he been watching? Needless to say, when
he started describing a scene involving a certain Ms. Quigley, I resigned
myself to the fact that we were going home with Time Bandits again.
The North West Video Centre always stocked up on the
Charles Band movies though, which rarely ever troubled the censor beyond the 15
certificate. So while Return of the
Living Dead was still off-limits to me for a few years, Band movies became my
gateway drug into the horror movies that existed beyond the safety net of late
night TV. Two of my absolute favourite
Band movies from the days of the North West Video Centre were Ghoulies 2 and
Terrorvision. I’m sure we rented out those two so many times that this alone
kept the North West Video Centre afloat for many years.
Now in my mind, and I accept my mind only, Terrorvision is forever synonymous with the 5th of November, Guy Fawkes/Bonfire night. Have you ever tried to explain Guy Fawkes night to people from cultures that don’t celebrate it, without making us seem like a nation of macabre oddballs.
Well, every year we celebrate the life of a failed terrorist by sending children out on the streets with a dummy of the man’s corpse to beg for money by saying “penny for the guy”. As well as attending fireworks displays and public bonfires that usually end with an effigy of Guy Fawkes being burned to death...all of which has caused more people to die, be burnt or maimed than Guy Fawkes could have ever had hoped to achieve had he actually been successful in blowing up the House of Lords.
Still, I always used to enjoy Guy
Fawkes night allot. That was until one
year in school when they showed what I guess you’d call a public information or
classroom scare film about bonfires and warning of the dangers of the 5th
of November. Now, I know you hear about
people who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s being traumatised by public information
films about children being electrocuted, nuclear war or the spirit of dark and
lonely water, but honesty all that must have passed me by, apart from this one
scare film about bonfire night. Maybe
memory is exaggerating its content to me, but at the time this PIF felt to my
young eyes as extreme as a Faces of Death film.
There were scenes of hands being burnt by sparklers, fireworks going off
in children’s faces....a real horror show...I swear this film also showed a
photo of a real life, badly burnt corpse too, and because they showed this
particular film year in, year out at school, I’d always try and memorise
whereabouts this shot appeared in the film, so I could look away at the precise
moment...sadly without much success.
Needless to say, after that film I never wanted anything to do with bonfire night ever again. My parents would ask if I wanted to go to a fireworks display or a bonfire this year...and I’d be like “no, no, no...can’t we stay in and rent a video instead”. So, on a yearly basis we would rent out a video on the 5th of November, and Terrorvision gradually became the coward’s way to celebrate bonfire night.
I absolutely adored Terrorvision as a kid, and even today it is a film I still have tremendous affection for. I suppose Terrorvision is the closest horror cinema has ever come to a National Lampoon’s Vacation film, it does tap into the same dysfunctional all-American family unit. There is the hopeless klutz father, the super hot mum, and their two kids who are considerably more smarter than the parents. The dad and mum, Stanley and Raquel Putterman are played by Gerrit Graham and Mary Woronov, who of course have a truckload of charisma, comedy chops and cult film appearances between them, and more than fit the bill as the B-level Chevy Chase and Beverly D’ Angelo. When Stanley puts up a massive satellite TV dish in the back garden, the Putterman household is blessed with hundreds of TV channels, broadcasting wresting, B-movies and softcore porn at all hours of the day. Unfortunately, the dish also beams an excitable dog-like space monster into the household that has a habit of eating people. I’m sure if you watch Terrorvision these days, it looks more than a little dated in terms of the tech, but at a time when we only had four TV channels and just this tiny little video shop down the road, the world of the Putterman’s looked like Nirvana. None of the characters seemed to work, the kids were allowed to stay up all night watching horror movies, and because they were Americans they could run around with machine guns and hand grenades too. This all sounded great with a capital G to me...and who wouldn’t want Gerrit Graham and Mary Woronov as their parents? Can you imagine if those two had actually had kids, they could have bred a whole new master race of coolness. One aspect of Terrorvision’s appeal that I think may have been taken for granted by an American audience, but had a greater impact outside of the States was its depiction of horror host culture. A long standing tradition in America, but something that was largely unheard of in the UK, and something we only really learned about through movies like this, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark and to a lesser extent the dreadfully unfunny Norman Thaddeus Vane film Midnight. Terrorvision’s Elvira like horror hostess being Medusa, who wears a tacky, fake bunch of snakes on her head, and introduces horror movies in linking segments that place particular emphasis on Medusa’s ample bosom.
From what I understand Terrorvision wasn’t really a big success in its day, despite me continually renting it out from the North West Video Centre, which is sad but looking at it with a more critical eye- you can kinda see why it initially fell between the cracks, and needed a bit of time to find an audience and grow into a cult movie. At first appearance Terrorvision looks like a kids movie, and it is an out and out comedy, which I think may have kept the hardcore horror crowd away, but it doesn’t quite fit the mould of being your typical 1980s family film either. There being a level of adult themed humour that would, and trust me did, go over the head of a younger audience. In the long term though, I think this aspect to the film is to Terrorvision’s benefit, because it is the kind of film you can enjoy as a simple monster movie as a kid, and then revisit as an adult and discover this whole extra layer of humour. Most of which evolves around the fact that the Putterman parents are swingers, and have a subplot where they invite another swinger couple into their home. Only for it all to go awry when they discover that the male half of the other swinger couple, Spirio, is bi-sexual and wants to get up to some gay fella business with Stanley. Of course, watching Terrorvision as a kid, none of this registered in my innocent eyes. I just thought the Puttermans were merely a very friendly couple who wanted to meet new people, and couldn’t understand why Stanley took against Spirio when he discovered Spirio was “into Greek”. It’s only when you rewatch the film as an adult that the penny drops, and you realise...ah, that’s what being into Greek means.
Up until the end of the 1980s, the North West Video
Centre was the only go to place in my area when it came to VHS rentals, but
eventually a couple of chain stores began muscling in on the action. I think the first one to appear was Jack
Beanstalk video, which was a much bigger and professional affair than the North
West video centre. Initially Jack
Beanstalk video actually had one of the pillars in the video shop decked out to
look like a beanstalk and a cuddly toy version of Jack climbing up it. I don’t
know whose idea it was to name a video store chain after a fairy tale –strange bedfellows
indeed- but credit where it’s due, I still remember it all these years on. Whereas with the North West Video Centre
everything felt very random, Jack Beanstalk was completely organised into
genres, with newer and older releases segregated. Jack Beanstalk was also the only chain I ever
encountered to have its own ‘erotica’ section which was located in a discrete
far corner of the shop, next to the horror section. This corner also had a pillar in the centre
of it that you had to walk around to see the erotica section, which kept it out
of view of your casual customer. In all
honesty, I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to the erotica section, but
would occasionally get a sideways glance of it from the horror section. From memory, I don’t think there was much to
write home about there. A couple of the
Porkys films maybe, a few likeminded American sex comedies, possibly The Stud
and Emmanuelle. The only one I can clearly
remember is a film called ‘The Sex O’Clock News’. I will admit to caving into curiosity and
watching that one on Youtube recently- and yeah- I clearly didn’t miss much by
not exploring the erotica section.
former site of Jack Beanstalk Video
Jack Beanstalk video was also one of the few chains I
knew that also sold videos, not ex-rental tapes, but brand new £9.99 priced
sell through releases, which didn’t appear to be a very popular sideline. Believe it or not, it was still very uncommon
for people to want to own tapes back then.
One tape that they had for sale was ‘Staying Alive’ and I swear from the
day Jack Beanstalk opened till the day it closed, they couldn’t give that tape
away. I remember picking it up once, spurred
on by the title Staying Alive and thinking it was a horror film, but then
realising it was just about a guy trying to make it as a dancer. Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park was
another video they had for sale, and I guess the Kiss army didn’t extend to
Walkden because you could blow the dust off that thing. Return of the Living Dead 2 was another sell
through title they had for sale, and yeah the public told Jack Beanstalk were
they could stick that one as well.
The videos I did buy from Jack Beanstalk were the Vipco ones. This being the second coming of Vipco on VHS in the early 1990s, which allowed younger viewers a diluted idea of what was around during the pre-cert era ...so I would have picked up The Groove Tube, The Deadly Spawn and The Bogey Man from there. I remember though that they only stocked one Vipco release at a time, when one Vipco tape sold they’d order the next one...and so on and so forth. Meaning that you’d have to pretty much buy everything Vipco put out, in order to get your hands on their next release.
Vipco's Greatest Hits
The rise of Jack
Beanstalk also coincided with the Ninja phenomenon of the late 1980s, and their
shelves were soon groaning with all manner of Ninja movies. I tended to gravitate towards the Godfrey Ho
type movies like Ninja Terminator, rather than American made fare like Enter
the Ninja and the American Ninja series.
The Ho stuff always seemed a bit more off the wall and wacky then their
American cousins, and silly as it sounds because they were made in Hong Kong
and had predominately Asian casts these seemed more ‘authentic’ Kung-Fu movies
in my eyes. The irony is that the Ho
films were of course re-jigged and re-edited versions of HK movies with new
footage starring Westerners in an attempt to make them more palatable to round
eyed tastes. There were so many of those
movies about then...Ninja Terminator, Golden Ninja Warrior, Ninja the
Protector, Ninja Holocaust, Ninja Thunderbolt, Ninja Commandments...over the
years they’ve all blurred together in my mind, a mass of multi-coloured Ninjas,
guys with too much eye shadow and Garfield phones. In their humourless, killjoy manner the BBFC
would often prune these films of the sight of ninja stars and nunchucks, even
though toy shops were doing a brisk trade in plastic replicas of such weaponry,
aimed at ninja loving kids like myself.
Jack Beanstalk’s horror section was a wee affair, but
nevertheless I did make a couple of interesting discoveries there. It was there
I first encountered the films of Pete Walker...House of the Long Shadows and
Schizo being the only two of his films that were still in circulation back
then. Not the greatest introduction to
his films if I’m being honest, I have to admit I’ve never been big on House of
the Long Shadows, I know some have affection for it on account of it being the
only time its four horror icon actors (Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter
Cushing, John Carradine) were onscreen together, but they’ve all been in much
better films separately. Schizo, I
suppose gives you a far greater idea of what Pete Walker films were all about,
but even so the general consensus is that it isn’t one of the better ones,
especially in that Warner Home Video release which had so, so much cut
out. I finally got to see my first
Friday the 13th film in Jack Beanstalk video too. Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason
Takes Manhattan, which I know isn’t one of the better ones, but because it was
the first one I saw, and the first time I was considered old enough to finally
see Jason in action, I probably have more affection for it than it deserves.
Trying to do the maths, I’d estimate I’d be around 13
at the time, and begrudgingly in a couple of instances I have to admit that
maybe I was a little too young to be watching this stuff. ‘The Video Dead’ is burnt into my brain for
that reason, boy...was that a gory movie for 1987. Censorship wise that one got away with allot
for the period, an iron is stuck into someone’s head, a zombie is cut in half
with a chainsaw, and in one scene characters cannibalise each other. Briefly, it centres around a bunch of zombies
who haunt a TV set, and are initially seen in a Night of the Living Dead type
b/w horror film playing on the TV, before emerging from the TV to kill the
people who are watching it. Technically,
I suppose the film should be called The Television Dead, since they emerge from
a TV set rather than a Video recorder, but since when did B-Movies let a thing
like plot accuracy get in the way of a brilliant title? The only way to stop the Video Dead from
coming out of the TV is to tape a mirror to the TV set....and this is so
embarrassing I can’t believe I’m publically admitting to it, but such did this
film get under my skin that after watching it I seriously asked my parents if
we could tape a mirror to the TV set that night. Just in case this film had any basis in
reality. At which point they seriously
began to consider whether I should be allowed to watch horror films at all.
Jack Beanstalk wasn’t the only video chain to open up
shop in the area. We also got a Ritz
video, I’m struggling to remember which came first Jack Beanstalk or Ritz. It seemed like they both sprung up roughly around
the same time. Ritz had this red
lettering on yellow background logo, and I remember yellow and red being the
predominate colour scheme of the store itself.
Ritz was the only store I ever encountered that was a two story affair,
new releases on the first floor, and older releases on the second floor. In terms of atmosphere, Ritz had by far the greatest
horror section, you had to go up this long, dark staircase to get to the horror
section on the 2nd floor.
Once you got there you were met by four walls of VHS, no windows, and
nothing but dead silence, you could hear a pin drop in there. A whole wall was dedicated
to shoulder to shoulder horror titles.
Ones that I remember are Mutant, Mutant 2, Scared to Death, CHUD, Night
of the Living Dead, The Devil Within Her and Night of the Alien. The rest are a bit of a blur but I’m fairly
certain An American Werewolf in London and a couple of the Friday the 13th
and Prom Night sequels were there as well.
Mutant, I saw again recently and while there are a couple of moments
that I vividly recalled from the VHS days, like zombie children attacking the
heroine in a toilet cubicle, I was a little taken aback by how slow paced it
was. Frankly, I’m amazed that younger me
made it through it. Mutant 2 was a bit
of a con-job, in that it was an unrelated foreign film that the distributor-
Entertainment in Video- had re-titled.
Mutant 1 having presumably done enough business on UK video to warrant a
sequel, even if the distributor had to invent one. Devil Within Her was an Apex video tape, a
budget price label, whose releases you rarely saw on the rental shelves, so
that in itself was an abnormality. Night
of the Living Dead was that awful colourised version that Palace Video put out
in the late 1980s. People tend to forget
that the colourised abomination was the only way to see the film in the UK for
many years. There had been a pre-cert
VHS of the b/w version but that had largely disappeared from view by this time,
it wouldn’t be until 1995 that Tartan video re-issued the b/w version on tape.
Until then you were stuck with turning the colour down on your TV set to see
the film as Romero intended. Scared to
Death is another film that like Mutant, looks a little slow paced today, but
all in all I’d say lived up to the expectations of its VHS sleeve, and stills
of its Alien-like creature the Syngenor, that I’d seen in Starlog magazine.
Night of the Alien was another con job re-titling of a film the rest of the world seems to have gotten as Future-Kill, but in the UK it was Night of the Alien, complete with a piece of HR Giger artwork that had been commissioned for the Future-Kill poster. Based on that and the UK release title, you’d imagine this to be the type of movie that Scared to Death was, an Alien imitation set on earth due to its lower budget. In reality, it begins like a mixture of Scorsese’s After Hours and a frat comedy, with a bunch of nerds being dared into spending a night in the rough area of town, which is lorded over by a disfigured bad guy called Splatter (Texas Chainsaw Massacre icon Ed Neal), who wears a metallic mask and kills people with a spiked glove. So technically, yes this is a film about people spending a night in a territory that is ‘alien’ to them, but c’mon no one renting a film called Night of the Alien would have expected that to be what the title referred too. The predictable BBFC cuts didn’t help either.
Looking back, I can’t emphasise enough how
creepy it was up there in the horror section, and dangerous too. No windows, no emergency exit, and just a
staircase to downstairs as the only way out, pretty much a health and safety
nightmare. For the majority of the time
you pretty much had the place to yourself as well, on the rare occasions there
was anyone else up there, they tended to be older guys, loitering around. On reflection I suppose I should be grateful
that the only traumatic thing that happened to me up there was being eyeballed
by the characters on the VHS covers of CHUD, Scared to Death and Night of the
Alien.
formally The Ritz Video Shop, the stairway to the horror section visible to the right
The most amusing incident to play out at the Ritz
video shop, actually took place on the first floor. My grandparents, who were a bit of a soft
touch when it came to me, were talked into renting out Predator on my
behalf. So, we were driving back to my
grandparents to watch it, and half way home I noticed that the tape in the
generic, see through Ritz video box, bore a 15 certificate. Upon opening it, I discovered that the tape the
cashier had given us was in fact Children of a Lesser God. The Oscar nominated film
about a deaf woman falling in love, which of course is very easy to mistake for
Predator, the plots of those two films being practically interchangeable!! So,
we turned the car around and rushed back to the shop. Fortunately they still had the correct tape,
thus preventing any poor sod who actually wanted to see Children of a Lesser
God from going home with Predator instead.
Ever since then though, those two films have always been intertwined in
my mind...Children of a Lesser Predator.
Ritz eventually moved to the other side of Walkden
Shopping Centre, without much change to its set up. Two floors, new releases on the first floor,
older stuff upstairs, lengthy staircase to the second floor, which tended to
keep the regular customers confided to the first floor. Although my eyes would always go towards the
horror section, for some reason when it comes to Ritz mark two, I tend to
remember the videos in the other sections the more. The ‘action’ section had Blazing Magnum, the
Italian film with Stuart Whitman, Special Effects by Larry Cohen, and Crimewave
by Sam Raimi. I’m pretty sure the comedy section had one of the Confessions
films...probably Pop Performer, and Rosie Dixon: Night Nurse. So the British
sex comedy films were still around back then, the fact that they weren’t
allowed to play on TV, presumably giving them a shelf life in the VHS shops
that the Hammer and Amicus films of a similar vintage didn’t have. One other thing I remember about the second
incarnation of Ritz is that the top of the staircase that took you to the
second floor had a poster for Troll 2, which remained there for the longest time,
and yeah, Troll 2 was quite the jaw dropper going into it expecting a direct
sequel to Troll. This of course being
years before the ‘so bad its good’ cult sprung up around Troll 2, these days I
don’t think you can ever fully recapture the experience of what it’s like to go
into Troll 2 blind. I actually had a bad
experience at the 2nd Ritz once. Me and my mother were on the first
floor minding our own business, and I was looking over the VHS box of Class of
1999. I don’t even think we were
considering renting it, but this old crone behind the counter saw me with that
video and started laying into us, claiming “I don’t think it would be appropriate
to rent that out for him, that is an extremely violent film, they don’t put 18
certificates on these things for nothing”.
Really reading the riot act to us.
I still actually have Class of 1999 on video, despite the fact that I don’t
really like the film all that much, nor do I even have a machine to play it on,
but I like keeping it around. Call it my
symbolic victory over all the censorious killjoys of the VHS era.
As far as I remember the North West Video Centre, Ritz
and Jack Beanstalk video all co-existed together. Obviously they were in competition with each
other, but I don’t remember any of them putting the other out of business. Then came the big one, Blockbuster Video and
when they dropped one of those on Walkden, things changed considerably. I’ve never really understood the nostalgic
love for Blockbuster video. Out of all
the rental stores it was the one that felt the most corporate and
impersonal...plus we were hearing all these horror stories from the States
about how they were killing off all of the smaller video chains over
there. It didn’t stop us from going however,
and it is true that Blockbuster did kill off the competition. The North West
Video Centre, Ritz and Jack Beanstalk all disappeared off the map pretty soon
after. Blockbuster’s edge over the competition
was that they had multiple copies of the same movie, thereby removing the anxiety
and disappointment of going to the video shop and not getting the film you
wanted. I remember Jack Beanstalk only
had one copy of Robocop 2, and you’d go there and find it had been rented out,
go back the next day and find it hadn’t been returned on time...etc, etc. So in those smaller stores it could be quite
the wild goose chase to get hold of new movies.
By this time my taste in movies had tended to drift outside of the mainstream anyway, and in fairness if you were prepared to spend some time exploring their soulless shelves, Blockbuster wasn’t all mainstream dross. Among the older stuff that was still on Blockbuster’s shelves was the Deathstalker series, Bruce Lee films, Truck Turner with Isaac Hayes, Black Mama, White Mama, Twilight People, they also had that rare, English dubbed release of A Better Tomorrow that RCA/Columbia put out a good few years before John Woo became a cult figure.
I’ve mentioned this in depth before but my local Blockbuster also had this strange, regional American film called The Hunted (aka Johnny Vik), which Intervision video had ridiculously tried to pass off as a Rambo/First Blood type movie. It was very rare to see a pre-cert era tape still on the rental shelves by then, so that alone attracted me to that one. The irony is that these type of tapes were the first to end up in Blockbuster’s ‘for sale’ bin, in order to make way for multiple copies of Titanic, Gladiator and Braveheart, and yet all these years on those older tapes are the only ones to have any value, whereas all those mass produced, mainstream titles are now the absolute dead wood of the VHS era.
Now, I’m no expert or historian when it comes to physical media, I was just someone in the field, but from my perspective what seemed to be the death knell for Blockbuster was the transition from VHS to DVD. The DVD format felt like it didn’t lend itself well to the overnight rental model. Whereas with VHS all that tended to be on the tape was the film itself and a few trailers, DVDs suddenly had extra scenes, audio commentaries, interviews etc etc, something you couldn’t just consume overnight and return the next day. During the VHS era there also seemed to be a lengthy gap between a video being available for rental and a video being able to buy. Whereas that gap didn’t seem to exist during the DVD period- and most people tended to go with the option of buying a DVD rather than renting it. From what I remember when Blockbuster made the switch from VHS to DVD, we only ever rented the one DVD from them, an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie called- oh so appropriately- End of Days. That indeed, was the end of days for me as far as movie rentals go. The video rental shops, the North West Video Centre, Jack Beanstalk, Ritz had all gone by then, and Blockbuster folded in the UK a few years later. Time moved on.
the unmarked grave of Blockbuster Video
As I was saying to an internet buddy recently, I
thought that when we end up on the very, very wrong side of thirty, we are
meant to be all jealous and bitter about the technology and freedoms that are
enjoyed by young people which weren’t around in our day, but I’m still waiting
for those kind of feelings to start kicking in.
If anything, I actually feel sorry for people growing up in these days
of COVID-19 and all the other unrest and upheaval in the world, and take pride
in the fact that I grew up in the video era. It’s true, not everything was
great back then- this isn’t some rose tinted look back at the VHS era- the
films were often cut to shreds, many key horror films were banned outright, we
were frequently duped by re-titled movies that didn’t live up to expectations,
tapes got worn out, beaten up and ended up looking like shit, but I can say I
grew up in a era that people who were there look back on fondly, and that
people who weren’t now view with fascination and wonder. A claim that
tragically is going to be denied to anyone growing up these days. That’s the problem with golden ages though,
you never truly realise you’re living through one until it is all over.
Don’t forget to tape a mirror to your TV set
tonight.
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